My View: My question to leaders of the organized church in Rockford

Saturday

Aug 23, 2014 at 11:00 AM

The Great Commandment: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” Luke 10:27

ZION Development considers six elements to be essential for a healthy neighborhood: housing, education, health, meaningful work, supportive social relationships, and faith and moral values. In this article I am interested not in what faith and moral values might be missing in our poor neighborhoods, but rather what it might take to get people of faith in Rockford to commit to significantly greater action than we have seen to date.

I am nervous about writing this, but this question which has been pestering me for a long time, and it seems like a good time to ask it. But first let me lay out what have been fundamental ideas for me, which have inspired and sustained me for 38 years doing Christian community development.

1. If Jesus says that the most important things in life are to love God and love my neighbor, then I challenge myself to focus my life on those tasks and try to align all the rest of my life’s activities with those two objectives.

2. The way I read the Bible, my strategy for living out The Great Commandment, is to be together with my brothers and sisters in Christ — the Church. Living out The Great Commandment is not to be a solo act — it’s supposed to be a team effort by the community of faith.

3. While I fully acknowledge the importance and relevancy of loving my individual neighbors, the Bible clearly states that “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly[a] with your God,” Micah 6:8. Serving the collective poor among us is the Bible’s ongoing top priority when it comes to acting justly.

4. I have come to believe that the most effective, proven and sustainable strategy for serving the poor involves development, not charity.

5. I have come to believe that the most effective, proven and sustainable strategies for development occur at the neighborhood level.

6. I know that Rockford’s poverty is highly concentrated in several neighborhoods near the city’s core. These neighborhoods lack both the resources to develop themselves and the sustaining leadership to direct transformational development.

7. We have powerful examples of this. All over the country, organizational members of the Christian Community Development Association, have, for more than 25 years, advocated for and demonstrated the effectiveness of developing poor neighborhoods by moving into those neighborhoods and utilizing well-defined strategies and tools to bring about substantial, meaningful and sustainable change. It is, in effect, a missionary model without the “white man’s burden” mentality.

So, we Christians know what we are supposed to do — The Great Commandment. We know that we are to live it out as a strategically coordinated body — the church. We know that our primary focus needs to be on the collective poor. We have plenty of examples of strategies which actually work in doing so.

My question: What would it take to get the church in Rockford to strongly lead its members, in organized, coordinated and respectful ways, to move into poor neighborhoods and begin the development work which would have a high probability of bringing about substantial, meaningful and sustainable change?

So, there it is. My big question. I genuinely want to know how people of faith, especially church leaders, respond to this question. Hopefully the dialogue will result in poor people in Rockford being served better. Thank you in advance for your gracious consideration of this very important question.